The X Prize

Hello and welcome to the Strawman, the newsletter that’s like a Michelin star restaurant for your brain - keeping you fed with some high quality content!

Today we’re talking about the X Prize, a non-profit that runs public competitions with huge prizes to encourage technological advancements that can benefit humanity. Sounds fancy huh?

Since 1995, the X Prize has run a number of competitions ranging from women’s safety to ocean health. Perhaps most famously, they set out a $10m award for the first privately funded team to send a spacecraft to the ‘edge of space’ - 100KM from the earth. Since then, we’ve seen Musk, Bezos, Branson, and many others make their own forays in to space. They sure know how to get folks excited about impact.

A Slow Burn

This week, the X Prize announced their latest competition, an $11M, 4-year competition to ‘develop and demonstrate fully-autonomous capabilities to detect and extinguish wildfires’. Hundreds of teams will participate with multiple milestones until a winner emerges. Think of the Fifa World Cup but for fighting forest fires - I’d buy tickets!

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few years, it’s clear that the scale and impact of Extreme Wildfire Events (EWEs) has been increasing. In fact, wildfires account for 80% of global fire damages. In California, 18 of the 20 biggest fires in the state’s history have all happened since 2000 and the cost of these fires has risen to almost $350B per year.

Future-proofing fires

Despite the immense cost to infrastructure and in, some cases, even human life, the way we fight forest fires hasn’t changed in decades. The X Prize is hoping that new technologies such as autonomous drones, precise satellite technology and improved predictive algorithms can help us be better prepared and combat these fires faster.

Historically, the X Prize has brought together top scientists, investors, and builders to come up with solutions. Like the Met Gala for climate tech, the founding team for this challenge includes leaders across each of these fields.

The hope is that beyond these cash prizes, the X Prize will help in attracting significant additional private funding, bring the issue to the attention of regulators, and help kick-off a new generation of companies that can help us fight forest fires more effectively. We’re excited to see what emerges.

Until next time,

The Strawman